Gargan - Tocqueville - Historical Prognosis

Tocqueville and the Problem of Historical Prognosis
Author(s): Edward T. Gargan

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jan., 1963), pp. 332-345
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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Tocqueville and the Problem of Historical Prognosis
EDWARD T. GARGAN*
ALEXIS de Tocqueville, in an extraordinary passage in his Democracy, antic-

ipated the concern of modern historical scholarship for the comparative study
of civilizations when he wrote:
God does not have to think at all in general terms about mankind. He sees with
a single glance and separately all the creatures who compose humanity, and He
understands in each of them the similarities that bring them together and the
differences that leave them isolated from one another.
God does not have any need for general ideas; that is to say, He never feels the
necessity of including together under the same form a great number of analogous
objects in order that He may think about them more easily.
For man it is completely otherwise. If the human intellect were to attempt to ex-
amine and judge all the particular cases that demand attention, it would soon be-
come lost in the midst of the immensity of details and it would no longer under-
stand anything. In this extreme situation man has recourse to an imperfect but
necessary action that helps him in his weakness but which gives further proof
of his limitations.'
Commenting further on man's need to generalize, Tocqueville observed

that this happy fault in man's intelligence required him to realize that all
his generalizations were flawed from the outset. He noted: "nothing in
nature is ever exactly comparable, no facts identical, no laws indiscriminately
applicable in precisely the same manner to several objects at the same in-
stance."2 Tocqueville welcomed the general ideas that serve to bind together
our experiences, but he regretted the inescapable incompleteness, the loss of
exactitude that accompany all extensions in our understanding.
Faithful to his own great generalization on the function of equality in
modern history, Tocqueville believed that aristocracies-politically responsive
to the needs of their privileged class-were unduly sensitive to the imperfection
of general ideas, while democracies such as America-politically ordered to
the needs of the masses of men-were, Tocqueville thought, almost hyp-
notized by the possibility of general explanations. In turn, it seemed to
* The author of Alexis de Tccqueville: The Critical Years r848-I851 (Washington, D. C.,
1955), Mr. Gargan is a professor at Loyola University, Chicago. He read this paper in part at the
First Congress of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Salzburg,
Austria, October I96I.
1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres compltes, ed. J. P. Mayer (definitive ed., Paris, I951-58),
I, De la democratie en Ambique, pt. 2, 20.
2 Ibid.
332
Tocqueville and Historical Prognosis 333
Tocqueville that the French of his generation were also caught up in a frantic
and insatiable passion to generalize. The English, on the contrary, appeared
too rigidly fixed to the particular, and Tocqueville proposed that only as
the very structure and constitution of their society altered would they de-
velop the capacity to see things in their totality. He could not make up his
mind as to whether such a development in England would be an advance or
a retreat in that country's intellectual achievement.3
When Tocqueville reviewed his generation's quest for the middle
ground that supports the valid generalization, he evaluated at the same time
his own struggle to master the science and art of constructing the reasonably
acceptable generic statement. He had appreciated from the outset of his
intellectual life that this was the central methodological issue in his own
work. In the opening pages of Democracy he carefully warned his readers
that in developing his theme he would not hesitate to stretch his ideas and
hypotheses to their breaking point. He did not believe, however, that such
a procedure would subtract from the real and concrete character of his find-
ings. "I have never," he wrote, "knowingly molded facts to ideas instead of
ideas to facts." Accordingly, as soon as he established that the progress of
democracy in Western history was the factual subject to be analyzed,
then the logic he obeyed required that he also admit that his subject was
equally "the future of the communities of Europe."4
Given his true subject, the future of Europe, Tocqueville then boldly
asserted: "It must not be forgotten that the author who wishes to be under-
stood is obliged to carry all his ideas to their utmost theoretical conclusions
and often to the brink of what is false and impracticable, for if sometimes it
is necessary to depart in action from the rules of logic, such is not the case
in discourse, and a man finds it almost as difficult to be inconsistent in his
language as to be consistent in his conduct." With this rule as his guide to
observation, reflection, and exposition, Tocqueville drew the conclusion that
if man, unlike God, must generalize, so too, unlike God for whom all past
and future are present, man must attempt to reach a measure of foreknowledge.
Of this obligation to attempt prognosis he wrote: "I have not undertaken to
see differently from others, but to look further; and while they are concerned
for the morrow only, I have wanted to think of the whole future."5
Tocqueville's care for "the whole future" eventually permitted him in his
Democracy to refer less and less to the American scene and, especially in his
second volume, to identify his theme as "modern society" and even more
3 Ibid., 21-23
4 Ibid., I, pt. I, II, I2.
5 Ibid., I3, I4.
334 Edward T. Gargan
concretely as "the destiny of mankind." This responsibility, which after nine

years of labor he described as "the extreme limit of my task," compelled
Tocqueville to formulate his many predictions concerning the prospects of
modern society.6 The most significant of his suggestions are well known.
They include his estimate that the individual citizen in the modern state
would become more and more spiritually isolated and, standing alone, be less
independent and less free than was expected from the promise of a demo-
cratic universe. At the same time that Tocqueville expressed his apprehension
over modern man's destiny to become a member of "the lonely crowd" he
was gravely troubled also by the conforming pressures of modern society.
He predicted, as William H. Whyte emphasizes: "If America ever destroyed
its genius it would be by intensifying the social virtues at the expense of
others, by making the individual come to regard himself as hostage to pre-
vailing opinion, by creating in sum a tyranny of the majority."7 Equally well
known is his prediction that in a society where, at least in theory, the solitary
and weak individual is sovereign, the state will absorb that power and with
its institutional apparatus and centralized force become omnipotent, omni-
present, and, perhaps, severely despotic. Even more celebrated is Tocque-
ville's uncanny proposal that in the world's future two powers, Russia and
the United States, would bid to determine the destinies of half the earth.
"Their starting point," he wrote, "is different and their courses are opposite,
yet each of them seems marked out by a hidden plan of Providence to hold
in their hands one day the destinies of half the world." In this case it should
be noted that beneath his reference to Providence Tocqueville plotted his
projection on the mundane basis of the growth of these nations' real wealth
and especially on the rate of their population increase in proportion to their
neighbors' in the community of nations.8
Yet the magic quality and success of Tocqueville's prognosis are less
important than the reasons that guided and gave sanction to his quest. ITis
effort of men like Tocqueville, Auguste Comte, J. E. Renan, and Friedrich
Nietzsche to perceive in some fashion the form of the future has been char-
acterized by Karl L6with as "the fundamental quest of the modern historical
consciousness."9 For Tocqueville such an effort was only possible because the
6 Ibid., I, Pt. 2, 335, 338.
7 William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York, I957), 438-39.
8 Tocqueville, Oeuvres complates, ed. Mayer, I, pt. I, 430.
9 Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago, I949), 227. A brilliant and profound dis-
cussion of this modern concern for the future, and the "predicament" that it involves with
regard to the past, is developed in Hannah Arendt's Between Past and Future (New York, i96i).
Equally relevant are the position of Martin Heidegger and his examination of the question,
"Should history then have the possible for its theme?" (See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
[6th ed., Tiibingen, I949], 394; secs. 72-76, pp. 372-97.) And Edward Hallett Carr has boldly
examination of history revealed again and again that nations and societies,
starting from different points and following individual paths, arrived at
similar situations, problems, and great alternatives in their common destinies.
Tocqueville, it is true, freely used the idea that such universal results had a
providential cast. Historical phenomena inviting prognosis were, as was the
democratic movement, universal and durable. In their progress they could be
seen to gain a strength and consistency that "escaped all human interference";
all events and all men ministered to their development.'0
Tocqueville had learned from his reading of Guizot's Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe and his attendance at Guizot's lectures on the Histoire
de ia civilisation en France to think of such continuous developments as
providential." But even when Tocqueville sought the sacred support of
Providence to give force to his observations, the test that he employed was
a profane one: the presence in any historical process of that which is constant
and cumulative in impact, the extensive evidence that a process in history
was unfolding toward an ascertainable present and dimly known future. In
every case it is only the continuous record of the past that permits and
commands such judgments and prognoses.
When hardly mature, and a decade before he finished his Democracy,
Tocqueville employed this test of the individuality, durability, universality,
continuity, and cumulative impact of the significant historical trend in a
fragmentary essay on English history.'2 In this essay, composed with the
help of a most conventional and even prosaic historical guide, an abridgment
of John Lingard's History of England, Tocqueville first examined the transi-
tion of the states of Europe from a monarchical, hierarchical, aristocratic society
and polity toward a democratic and egalitarian status. He traced the struggle
for power between kings and aristocracies, a conflict that in the course of
centuries proved too much for their brittle bones and resulted in widening
their quarrels to include the nonaristocratic members of society, the middle
affirmed on this issue: "Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have
the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question:
Whither?" (See Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan
Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, January-March I96I [New York, i962],
86-9I, I43.)
10 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, I, pt. I, 4.
11 For Tocqueville's admiration of Guizot's lectures, see Tocqueville, Oeuvres compltes,
pub. Madame Marie de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont (Paris, I864-75), TO (Tocque-
ville to Beaumont, Aug. 30, I829). See also Tocqueville to Ernest Chabrol, May I8, i83I,
Yale Tocqueville Collection, Yale University Library, B. I. a (2). For an account of Guizot's
view of Providence in history, see Mary Consolata O'Connor, The Historical Thought of Franfois
Guizot (Washington, D. C., I955), 7I-8I.
12 Alexis de Tocqueville, "Reflections on English History," in Journeys to England and Ire-
land, ed. J. P. Mayer, tr. George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer (New Haven, Conn., I958), 2I-4I.
class, and eventually le peuple. Tocqueville insisted that in order to appreci-

ate such a development one had to disregard individuals and concentrate on
"the march of peoples spreading over on top of each other and getting con-
tinually mixed up, but each still keeping something that it had from the
beginning." In recounting this story it was the separate routes by which the
English and French nations had arrived at a similar historical situation that
fascinated Tocqueville and convinced him that a great and perhaps irrevoca-
ble trend in history was in operation. It is in this early fragment that Tocque-
ville first expressed his idte mere that became the basis of his many pre-
dictions. "As I said before," he wrote," . . . after all, rational equality is the
only state natural to man, since nations get there from such various starting
points and following such different roads" 113
In Tocqueville's mature work prognosis was possible only because the

continuing democratic revolution in Western history had not yet removed
the historical record of a culture that was aristocratic in form and substance.
The shadow of the departing aristocratic order over the new society made
it possible to examine and compare in exquisite detail the completed arch of
the older societies and the beginning curve of the new universe. Tocqueville
believed that the likely contour of the new society could be drawn, though
in very light lines, because the historical draftsmen had the experience of
tracing with considerable accuracy the institutional shape of the aristocratic
order that had constituted Europe's past.
For this reason, in the second and critical volume of Tocqueville's
Democracy, the major share of his attention is divided between the apparent
emerging qualities of a democratic civilization and the historically formed
spirit of the dying aristocratic societies of Europe. Tocqueville's study of
democracy depends absolutely on his reconstruction and interpretation of
the history of aristocracy. Only through the most precise and extensive con-
sideration of every feature of the aristocratic culture of the past is he able to
suggest the outline of the emerging society.
In Democracy Tocqueville's detailed account of the fading historical
dimensions of the former society is truly astonishing. Not content with
examining just the political institutions of the past, he also examined in
depth, though with great economy, the intellectual life, the poetry, the
theological sense, the architecture, the metaphysics, and the scientific attitude
of the ancien regime. Pursuing more closely the spirit of the old order, he
investigated the structure of language, the grammar, the rhetoric, the litera-
13 Ibid., 2I, 28.
ture, and the form of aristocratic thought.'4 In every instance only this pre-
cise scrutiny of the past allowed and made possible the fashioning of sug-
gestions as to the future.
Thus, after analyzing the development of the style and form of the
aristocratic literature of Europe, Tocqueville felt free to propose that the
polish, nuance, balance, and harmony of the earlier literature would be
followed by a literature that would be less delicate, less sensitive, less gram-
matically correct, but energetic, realistic, and exciting. And, intrigued by the
history and future of his own discipline, he feared, perhaps unnecessarily,
that a tendency to employ more abstract categories and more abstract lan-
guage in the description of human behavior would continue without re-
sistance.15 The Saint-Simon of the eighteenth century was replaced by
the Saint-Simon of the nineteenth century.
Tocqueville also reviewed the concepts of God and man, which were pre-
cious to the aristocratic mind and heart. He noted, for example, that the
aristocratic order of the past could not entertain easily the idea of the un-
ending perfectibility of man, the belief in progress as intrinsic to the human
condition. In the future, Tocqueville believed, men fashioned in a democratic
world would give themselves passionately to this belief. He suggested: "In
proportion as castes disappear and the classes draw together; as manners,
customs, and laws vary because of the tumultuous intercourse of men; as
new facts arise; as new truths are brought to light; as ancient opinions die
and others take their place . . . he [man] tends unceasingly toward that im-
measurable grandeur that he sees imperfectly at the end of the long road
which humanity has yet to travel." '0
14 Tocqueville, Oeurres completes, ed. Mayer, I, Pt. 2, I I-93.

16 Ibid., 62-65, 73-74. Johan Huizinga praised Tocqueville especially for the "prophetic
insight" involved in this observation. Drawing upon Tocqueville's suggestion, Huizinga wrote:
"the scholar has staked out too large a claim for his thinking. . . . The result is what De
Tocqueville saw happening so clearly.... A vague, indeterminate historical concept takes form,
with all sorts of heterogeneous notions loosely associated in it." (See Huizinga's "The Task of
Cultural History," in Men and Ideas, Essays by Johan Huizinga, tr. James S. Holmes and Hans
van Marle (New York, I959), 44, 63.)
16 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, I, pt. 2, 40. Certainly after 1848 and continuing
until the present, confidence in the idea of progress has been doubted by Burckhardt, Nietzsche,
Spengler, and others. (See Georg G. Iggers, "The Idea of Progress in Recent Philosophies of
History," Journal of Modern History, XXX [Sept. I958], 2I5-26.) Yet sympathy for the truth
contained in this idea is not absent from modern discussion. In I959 Joseph E. Seagram and
Sons, Inc., sponsored a symposium on "the future of man" participated in by Milton S. Eisen-
hower, Julian Huxley, Devereux C. Josephs, Ashley Montagu, Hermann J. Muller, and
Bertrand Russell. During the symposium Muller, a I946 Nobel laureate, insisted that follow-
ing some "genetic remoulding for mankind, . . . there will be no limit to the possibilities of
men's advancement." (See "The Future of Man": A Symposium [New York, I959], 36.) David
Riesman has felt obliged to argue: "It is fashionable today to sneer at the idea of progress as an
illusion, fit only for an adolescent, Deweyan America, not a mature one which understands
original sin and the dead weight of institutions. It is admittedly difficult to find unequivocal
The facets of culture that Tocqueville compared as the basis of his pre-
dictions are endless. He did not shirk, however, from this nearly impossible
task which alone permits him to "look further." Not only did he compare
such great questions as the sense of freedom in the past and present, but he
also distinguished the relationship between father and son, the characteristic
conduct of the lover and beloved, the bride and the matron; he discussed the
taste for luxury, the educational goals of aristocratic and democratic societies,
the conception of fame, of virtue. The composure and the sense of happiness
and unhappiness of the past and present were compared. And when he had
centered his attention on the inner peace or discord that occupied man in the
past and visits him in the present Tocqueville was able to propose that acute
anxiety would be the distinguishing feature of modern history. "In demo-
cratic times," he observed, "enjoyments are more intense than in the ages
of aristocracy, and the number of men who partake in them is vastly larger;
but on the other hand, it must be admitted that man's hopes and desires are
more often disappointed, the soul is more stricken and perturbed, and care
itself more piercing." 17
After depicting modern civilization and its discontents in contrast to the
psychological burdens of the past, Tocqueville suggested that modern society
should develop a concern for the future that would replace the expectation
that had sustained past ages of faith. In making this diagnosis he was
especially influenced by his belief that in modern societies, as distinct from
the past, decisions of great importance in political matters were made with-
out forethought or plan. Overwhelmed by this feeling, Tocqueville did not
anticipate the rationality and planning that would characterize subsequent
modern states. Chance now seemed to govern; whereas in the past the dur-
able interests of a kingdom or class consciously determined the weightiest
decisions. Warning against the anarchical tendencies of the new society,
Tocqueville advised: "The task of those in power is not less clearly marked
out. At all times it is important that those who govern nations should act
with a view to the future; but this is even more necessary in democratic and
sceptical ages than in others... " 18
So greatly did Tocqueville fear the political consequences for a society
that entertained no thoughts for the ultimate future of man that he felt
compelled to propose that, as a part of their civic instruction, men be edu-
cated to look toward the final end. He wrote:
indices for progress, but I think it capricious to deny the possibility of it." (See David Riesman,
Constraint and Variety in American Education [New York, I958], I7I.)
17 Tocqueville, Oetrres completes, ed. Mayer, I, Pt. 2, I7I-255, esp. I45.
is ibid., I56.
When men have accustomed themselves to foresee from afar what is likely to
befall them in this world and to nourish their hopes only here, they will become
unwilling to always halt their expectations within the precise limits of this life,
and they will soon want to free themselves from these limits in order to cast
their looks still further. I do not doubt that by training the members of a com-
munity to think of their future condition in this world they would be gradually
and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions.19
Yet, in proposing how the future might be occupied with a still more
distant future, Tocqueville wove within the texture of his work an urgent
demand for some discussion of the limits of prognosis. He was to meet this
demand, not only in Democracy, but also consistently in all his later writings.
In the last section and pages of Democracy, he was careful to indicate the
limits that must attend all prognosis. He was especially anxious to caution
against the pessimism evoked by the foreseeable crises awaiting mankind.
"Let us then," he urged, "look forward to the future with that salutary fear
which keeps us alert and in combat readiness for freedom, and not with that
faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart."20
It was important for Tocqueville to identify the elements of fear and
hope that accompanied his estimation of the future alternatives for hu-
manity. In frankly admitting these anxieties, Tocqueville confessed to
considerations that have been described by R. G. Collingwood, a mod-
ern student of "the idea of history," as unhistorical, not the historian's
business. Rejecting absolutely any attention to the future by the historian,
Collingwood wrote: "As Hegel put it, the future is an object not of fore-
knowledge but of hopes and fears, and hopes and fears are not history.'
For Tocqueville, however, the student of modern civilization could not cast
aside those problems that evoke fear and hope. To do this would be to lose
one's humanity. Tocqueville preferred to run some risks while still recogniz-
ing the frailty of all prognosis.
Having reached "the extreme limit" of his task, Tocqueville concluded
by once more stressing the shortcomings of all prediction. As he closed
Democracy, Tocqueville cautioned: "The new society, which I have sought
to delineate and which I attempt to judge, has but just come into existence.
Time has not yet shaped it into perfect form; the great revolution by which
it has been created still continues; and amid the occurrences of our time it is
impossible to discern what will pass away with the revolution itself and
what will remain after it is over."22
19 Ibid., 157.
20 Ibid., 335.
21 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, I946), I20.
22 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, I, pt. 2, 336.
Yet Tocqueville could not end his "extreme task" without reaffirming
his view that "some principal traits" were so prominent, so pronounced, that
they could be "discerned and pointed out." Here again he returned to his
analogy of "the mind of the maker" to justify his effort to see things, though
obscurely, from this height.23 But even this admission that he was imagina-
tively attempting to approximate "divine contemplation" in human fashion
did not wholly satisfy Tocqueville. He was disturbed by the thought that
other students and theorists of society would construct, with material similar
to his, a dire future for mankind. He feared above all that these prognostica-
tions would deny man his essential liberty which transcends all prognosis.
And so in the last paragraph of Democracy Tocqueville warned and pleaded
for theories and predictions based on a view of the human condition as one
that is limited but essentially free.
I am not unaware that many of my contemporaries have thought that men are
never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey-I do not
know what-some insurmountable and unintelligent forces arising from anterior
events, from their race, or from the soil and climate. These are false and cowardly
doctrines which can never produce anything but feeble men and craven nations:
Providence did not create mankind either entirely independent or completely in
servitude. It traced, it is true, around every man a fatal circle that he cannot
leave, but within this vast confine man is powerful and free, and so also are
nations.24
When Tocqueville finished Democracy, with his reflections on freedom

and necessity, he reaffirmed his interest in this enduring question which
would continue to be a constant part of all his subsequent study and effort
at prognosis. His continued attention to the limits of successful prognosis
placed in balance his theory and practice.
As soon as the final part of Democracy was published, Tocqueville sent a
copy to John Stuart Mill. Mill responded excitedly to Democracy and en-
thusiastically praised Tocqueville's work on the "tendencies of modern so-
ciety." "You have," Mill wrote, "accomplished a great achievement: you
have changed the face of political philosophy, you have carried on the dis-
cussions respecting the tendencies of modern society, the causes of these
tendencies, & the influences of particular forms of polity & social order, into
a region both of height & depth, which no one before you had entered, & all
previous argumentation and speculation in such matters appears [sic] but
child's play now."25 Mill then more fully developed his appreciation of
23 Ibid., 336, 337-38.
24 lbid., 339.
25 Ibid., VI, Correspondance anglaise, pt. I, 328 (Mill to Tocqueville, May II, I1840).
Tocqueville's study in the important review of the volume he contributed

to the Edinburgh Review.26
Three years later (in I843) Mill finished his Logic and sent it to Tocque-
ville. Now completely occupied with his career as a deputy, Tocqueville
could not find the time to read the whole work and told his friend this.
Mill's discussion of the problem of "liberty and necessity," however, did
attract Tocqueville's attention, and he responded with interest to this sec-
tion of Logic.27 In treating the topic of liberty and necessity Mill denied the
character of inevitability to those causes and events conventionally described
as necessary, in that they take place if nothing intervenes.
Although Mill strengthened Tocqueville's disapproval of necessitarian
prognoses, he left room for carefully qualified predictions. Pleased with the
middle ground that Mill established, Tocqueville complimented him on "the
manner in which you have treated that eternal and frightening question of
human liberty upon which the solution of not only moral studies but also
polity depends." Continuing, Tocqueville assured Mill: "The distinction that
you make between necessity as you understand it and irresistibleness is like
a burst of light. It seems to me that here you have opened up a neutral
terrain on which the two opposed schools, or at least reasonable men of the
two schools [,j can easily recognize and understand one another."28
During Tocqueville's political career he neglected his academic studies
until after October i849 when he was dismissed from his post as Minister of
Foreign Affairs in the Second Republic. Following that humiliating exit from
office at the hands of Louis Napoleon, Tocqueville began his Souvenirs in
which he reconstructed his experience and understanding of the Revolution
of I848. When Tocqueville reflected on twenty months of history (he re-
stricted his memoirs to the period February i848-October I849) as distinct
from centuries of historical development, the problem of freedom, necessity,
and prediction took on another significance. In his Souvenirs Tocqueville
again found the great uniform theories of historical explanation less satis-
factory and stressed instead the role of chance in the destiny of men. As an
actor in the play of history, he now could see sharply the place of the un-
expected, the unplanned, and the undesirable development in human affairs.
To describe this unstable and unnerving aspect of history that defeats prog-
nosis, he fashioned his illuminating metaphor of the wind and the cord.
26 John Stuart Mill, in review of Tocqueville, Democracy in America, in Edinburgh Review,

LXXII (Oct. I840), I-47.
27 J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (2 vols., London, I875), II, 4I9-29.
28 Tocqueville, Oeuvres coinplPtes, ed. Mayer, VI) pt. I, 344 (Tocqueville to Mill, Oct. 27,
1843).
It is necessary to have lived a long time in the midst of parties and in the very
whirlpool where they move in order to understand at what point men mutually
push themselves beyond their own aims, and how the destiny of this world pro-
ceeds as a result of, but often contrary to, the wills which produce it, similar to
the kite which travels by the opposite action of the wind and the cord.29
Guided by his metaphor of the wind and the cord, Tocqueville rejected
all historical explanations that are closed to the prospect of the unexpected
and the accidental in man's history and destiny. "For my part," he insisted,
"I detest these absolute systems which represent all the events of history as
depending upon great causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as
it were, suppress men from the history of the human race. They seem nar-
row, to my mind, under the pretence of broadness, and false beneath their
air of mathematical truth." Yet, Tocqueville would not surrender completely
the possibility of analysis and prognosis. He continued: "Moreover, chance
or that tangle of secondary causes which we call chance, for want of knowl-
edge how to unravel it, plays a great part in all that happens on the world's
stage, although I firmly believe that chance does nothing that has not been
prepared beforehand. Previous deeds, the nature of institutions, the cast of
minds, and the state of manners are the materials which make up these im-
promptus which surprise and frighten us."30
In his retirement Tocqueville soon turned fully to the writing of history.
He wanted to meet the needs of his generation for an explanation of the
phenomena of the revolution that began in a quest for greater freedom and
ended twice with the advent of Caesarism. Tocqueville's now classical work
L'ancien regime et la Re'volution, published in I856, was one result of this
inquiry. Once again, as in his Democracy of twenty years earlier, Tocqueville
inseparably linked the past, present, and future in his analysis. In the fore-
word to his Anczen re'gime he promised that in his sequel: "I will try to
foresee, though necessarily imperfectly, our future." But even before that
work was done he felt confident that he could make some predictions on the
destiny of France and Europe. "In the midst of the night that is the future,"
he observed, "one can discern three truths very clearly."31 These realities were
the continuation of the democratic movement, the complete defeat of aristo-
cratic establishment, and the vulnerability of democratic societies to despotic
infection. On this he commented:
First . . . all our contemporaries are driven on by a force that we may hope to
regulate or curb, but cannot overcome.... Secondly . . . these people who are so
29 Tocqueville, Souvenirs, ed. Luc Monier (new ed., Paris, I942), 43.
30 Ibid., 72.
31 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, II, L'ancien regime et la Revolution, pt. I, 73.
constituted as to have the utmost difficulty in getting rid of despotic government

for any considerable period are the ones in which aristocracy has ceased to exist
and can no longer exist. Thirdly . . . nowhere is despotism calculated to produce
such evil effects as in social groups of this order....32
As Tocqueville pursued the sequel to his study of the Ancien r6gime, the
task of following the many shifts and changes in the course of the Revolution
recalled to him most vividly the unexpected developments that he had ex-
perienced in his own political career and participation in the making of
history. This experience had taught him the great difficulties in making pre-
dictions on the final form of things. For this reason he drafted in his uncom-
pleted fragments a paragraph in which he planned to admit that his history
had to end obscurely. This obscurity could not be avoided, he argued, because
in the study of the form of government created by the continuing French
Revolution one "cannot yet definitely know where it is still going to lead."33
It was also while preparing to write his further study of the Revolution
and Napoleon that Tocqueville again studied the history of Rome and its
decline. Rome's history was, he insisted, unique to its own time and not
easily made to fit the historical experience of the modern world. Further-
more, he thought that the confidence Rome had exhibited in the promises of
its eternity was a clear warning to the historian of the fundamental short-
comings of all prediction.34
Yet, considerations of a methodological character did not exclusively
determine Tocqueville's stress on the dangers and failures accompanying
all prognosis. Tocqueville's friendship for Gobineau required him to read
and think about that kind of prediction he had censured many times in his
own work. He was, however, obliged in friendship to read Gobineau's
Essai sur l'inegatlit des races humaines and to reply to Gobineau's incessant
demands for appreciation and understanding. For his part, Tocqueville
could only reject absolutely Gobineau's premises and predictions. "Your
doctrine," he wrote, "is rather a sort of fatalism, of predestination if you
wish. Very different, at any rate, from that of St. Augustine, from the
Jansenists, and from the Calvinists."35 Increduously, Tocqueville asked
Gobineau: "Do you really believe that by tracing the destiny of peoples
along these lines you can truly clarify history?" Surely, Tocqueville pro-
82 Ibid., 73-74.
83 Ibid., pt. 2, 343.
84 Ibid., 319-22.
85 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, IX, Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville
et d'Arthur de Gobineau, 202 (Tocqueville to Gobineau, Nov. i7, I853). The translation is
that of Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. John
Lukacs (New York, 1959), 227.
posed, the traditional historical methods were more appropriate, those that
"find the cause of human events in the influence of certain men, of certain
emotions, of certain thoughts, and of certain beliefs." 36
Three years of troubled correspondence did not, however, lead Gobineau
to give up pressing Tocqueville for approval. By this time Gobineau's pre-
dictions on the likely course of the West were centered on the Western
world's continuing decadence and decline. Tocqueville would not accept
the prognosis of such a physician, as Gobineau now termed himself. On
the contrary, Tocqueville insisted that he would simply change physicians.
In offering his response to the prognosis that is fatal, Tocqueville identified
the greatest limitation that attends every effort at prognosis. This was the
psychological certainty that all such dismal prognoses capture and hold the
allegiance of men less securely than all other analyses on the human condition.
Certainly, Tocqueville's own efforts at prognosis were included in his
advice, when he responded to Gobineau: "Thus your doctor will certainly
not number me among his clients. I must add that physicians, like philoso-
phers, are often greatly mistaken in their prognostications: I have seen more
than one person condemned by physicians who nevertheless became quite
well subsequently and angrily criticized the doctor for having uselessly
frightened and discouraged him."37
Yet it is a prediction that Tocqueville made concerning his own destiny
that reveals the heart of his entire concern for the past and future. Writing
in March I858, the year before his death, to his friend M. Freslon, Tocque-
ville proposed as a "new law" his observation that, contrary to conven-
tional wisdom, men brought more passion to intellectual and moral issues
as they advanced in age, rather than in their youth. "Men like you and me,"
he wrote, "appear to be very ridiculous enthusiasts to wise eighteen-year-
olds." He then prophesied: "According to this new law in my centenary I
should be all fire."38 The "law" which Tocqueville hoped would hold true
for himself, that he should be consumed as in fire for the cause of freedom,
was the only law he wanted to find governing the destiny of mankind.
Unlike many other significant historians of nineteenth-century France,
such as Fustel de Coulanges, Tocqueville did not have students and disciples
in the conventional academic sense.39 His suggestions on the needs and
difficulties of prognosis were not methodically pursued by any historians
36 Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes, ed. Mayer, IX, 203 (Lukacs, 228).
37 Ibid., 266 (Lukacs, 292) (Tocqueville to Gobineau, July 30, 1856).
38 Tocqueville, Ouevres completes, ed. Beaumont, VI, 441 (Tocqueville to Freslon, Mar. 1 6,
I1858).
89 For an account of Tocqueville's general influence, see J. P. Mayer, "Tocqueville's In-
fluence," History, 3 (i96o), 87-103.
specifically indebted to his struggle with the problem. The moderate rules
he experimented with to govern reflections on the future have not been de-
veloped in any systematic fashion. Lord Bryce, Tocqueville's greatest suc-
cessor as a student of modern democracies, however, paid Tocqueville the
compliment of imitating him with his own guarded predictions on "the
future of Democracy." Bryce admitted in his comparative study of modern
democracies that all predictions were "vain." But with his characteristic
common sense he added: "Nevertheless, since conjecture cannot be repressed,
and the tendencies of human nature remain as a permanent factor, let us see
whether men's behavior in the past may not throw some glimmer of light
upon the future." And in further imitation of Tocqueville, Bryce's predic-
tions were marked by his anxious meditation on the possibility that "the
roads that have led or may lead out of democracy are many."40
Yet, an interest in prognosis as exhibited by Tocqueville has not been
easily accepted in the modern era. Karl R. Popper has severely condemned
those who consider prediction possible to the historian.4' Convinced that
historians who dare to predict deny to man his freedom, and even prefer
totalitarian societies, Popper has forgotten the example of Tocqueville.
For his part, Tocqueville increasingly stressed the limits of historical
prognosis. His historical studies taught him to appreciate the distinctive
nature of historical reality, described at a later date by Friedrich Meinecke
when he wrote: "Individuum est inetfabile."42 Still, Tocqueville was never
able to suppress entirely a desire to see further. The critical issues of his own
time made it urgent that he accept this interest in prognosis as a necessary
though dangerous task. And Meinecke, in turn, illustrated this human
tendency when he introduced his own fears for the future of the West by
noting: "The fact that the water has risen higher round our necks ... perhaps
enables us to see even more clearly the danger of the special historical moment
at which we are standing... ."43 Tocqueville's historical predictions also had
followed his experience that the waters had risen to heights that could not
be ignored.
40 James Bryce, Modern Democracies (2 vols., New York, 1921), II, 597-609, esp. 599.
41 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston, 1957).
42 Friedrich Meinecke, "Values and Causalities in History," as reprinted in Fritz Stern,
The Varieties of History (New York, I956), 288.
43 Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism, the Doctrine of Raison d'ttat and Its Place in Modern
History, tr. Douglas Scott (New Haven, Conn., 1957), 432.

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Tocqueville and the Problem of Historical Prognosis

Author(s): Edward T. Gargan

ALEXIS de Tocqueville, in an extraordinary passage in his Democracy, antic-

Commenting further on man's need to generalize, Tocqueville observed

concretely as "the destiny of mankind." This responsibility, which after nine

class, and eventually le peuple. Tocqueville insisted that in order to appreci-

In Tocqueville's mature work prognosis was possible only because the

14 Tocqueville, Oeurres completes, ed. Mayer, I, Pt. 2, I I-93.

When Tocqueville finished Democracy, with his reflections on freedom

Tocqueville's study in the important review of the volume he contributed

26 John Stuart Mill, in review of Tocqueville, Democracy in America, in Edinburgh Review,

constituted as to have the utmost difficulty in getting rid of despotic government

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